Visitors/Objectional Spaces : Spatial Scaffoldings/Notes On Architecture

Strange Messengers.

Notes On Architecture.

Bodies In Space.

Sensations In Space and Time.

The Experience/entanglement of phenomena and idea.

Gildengate Documents/Collage/Pottery Works Farnham.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Making/Building Utility and Relevance : Works are rooted in the physical world.

 

Outpost 241122

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Elective Affinities.

Tate, Liverpool.

Penelope Curtis.

The Liveliness of Materials.

The nature of our involvement is crucial as we begin to select our meanings, as we have to also begin to exercise personal choice. 

The starting point for this exhibition was to find art which involved the spectator, an spectator immediately and which makes the body the bridge between the art and the spectator.

Using works that elicit a reaction from us based on physical recognition.

Engendering affinities both psychological and philosophical, much of the meaning in our world relates either actually or metaphorically to the body.

Creating art works that set up a network of psychological allusion.

Drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photographs, paintings, collages,scribblings and drafts, which are the secret and unformed property of the artist. These are not to be seen as artworks so much as the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure that bears the song or book or script along. They are a support system of manic tangential information. 

What you see in this book lives in the intricate world constructed around the songs, and which the songs inhabit. To me these pieces have a different creative energy to the formed works, they are raw and immediate, but no less compelling.

Stranger Than Kindness.

Nick Cave.

Properties do not reside in objects, they are between objects.

Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet.

Intimate Everyday Notations.

A Book Of Days.

Patti Smith.

The 'works' evoke a physical affinity that sets up a complicity in which the viewer is implicated in the work.

The possibility of identification with the 'works' is frequently assured by their liveliness.

Fundamental to this art is the fact that its viewers stand in front of it and physical experience is highlighted or becomes part of its conceptual framework.

A photographic skin neither dead or alive, it is the blemished surface which gives the work a fragility.

Ultimately it is the ambiguity of this photographic flesh, its skin of visual tenderness that is most unsettling.

This phantasmal world of quanta is our world.

Speculative Experiential Formwork.

The Nature of Matter/Liveliness of Materials.

The Primal Level of Physical Being.

The Order Of Time.

Helgoland.

Carlo Rovelli.

Cyanotype Process and Concepts of Practice.

Technically the work is more in line with that of the photogram. It is used to record light and shadow from a specific site, through the use of intermediaries, stencils and their movements across the duration of daylight.

Conceptually the use of the cyanotype process historically references architectural blueprints and the proofing of early photographic procedures.

Outpost 241121

The Artist's Reality

Philosophies of Art

Mark Rothko, 1940-41.

Without question the work I  found as incomplete and in places, frustratingly obscure, but it was a book, and a substantial one. It was clearly written as a volume, its contents speaking to a public rather than constituting an artist's private musings

Christopher Rothko, 2004.

The Artist's Dilemma

Art as a Natural Biological Function

Art as a Form of Action

The Integrity of the Plastic Process

Art, Reality, and Sensuality

Particularization and Generalization

Genalization since the Renaissance

Emotional and Dramatic Impressionism

Objective Impressionism

Plasticity

Space

Beauty

Naturalism

Subject and Subject Matter

The Myth

The Attempted Myth of Today

Primitive Civilizations Influence on Modern Art

Modern Art

Primitivism

Indigenous Art

Rembrandt discovered that his patrons were not interested in his plastic preoccupations with light when he painted The Night Watch, and that they preferred the obvious illustrative gifts of his contemporaries and followers. Monet and Cezanne discovered the same, watching Sargent and the exhibitors at the academy sell far inferior goods, succeeding because they adopted the French masters' method in its superficial aspects, while including enough familiarity so that the spectator revelled in the familiar while he was talking about the unfamiliar.

Things and Bodies/Shifting Signs

The haptic image/indexical/involuntary markings and the present instant, a body at the limit of its moment when it is most definitely intensely alive and in the present.

Beyond the body's blurred contours and indexical markers, to see through, to see sense challenged.

Time is persistently liminal, a suspended, extended present.

Mattering/Mutability,Accident, Flux

Experience/Existence/Presence 

Life Drawing/Staging Oneself/Others

Body in Space/Resilience,Endures

Organism-Person-Environment

Haptic slippages/propositions between subject and object, human and non human, between what is alive and what is animate.

Drawing/Anamorphic Perceptions, apprehended and felt, more than seen.

Drawing is not the form; it is the way of seeing the form.

Edgar Degas.

The human figure, like any animated object is alive. Even when in a seemingly static position- whether sitting or lying- it is actually in constant motion. To capture this fundamental fact, which makes the body profoundly different from a statue or a mannequin, one must learn to see both its physical structure and its actions in space.

Daniela Brambilla.

Between seeing and drawing, what is felt, hidden, made rendering visible.

Blindness, searching, instants marking the barely known phenomena between organism, person and environment.

The searching and reflexive nature of drawing, a questioning through the performative social body, and its perceptual spatial agency and with materials, environments and others.

Human Figure Drawing

Drawing Gestures, Postures and Movements.

Daniela Brambilla, 2014.

With a series of curved lines drawn quickly, without lifting the pencil from the paper, in a loose way and almost without looking away from the subject, identify the lines that make up not the outside, the external contour or the details, but the morphological whole of the figure at that precise moment- in a certain sense the internal engine, a synthesis between intentions and actions, between mind and body.

To achieve this result draw around the form's centre and at the same time beyond it, without defining volumes with closed lines.

Gesture

Seeing Contours

Superposition

Interior and Exterior

Proportions

Modelling

What It Isn't

Memory

Balance

Techniques

Light and Shadow

Chiaroscuro

Viewpoint

What to Say?

Movements of the Soul

The Forms of Age

The Sketchbook

Imagination

If you have learnt to write, you will also learn how to draw. The manual skill is the same; you are just changing your way of seeing and feeling. To understand the meaning of this statement, ask yourself:

 “Where am I when I am drawing?”

Thinking Bodies : Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-woman

Nicole Dawson, 2008.

Deleuze and Guattari have argued that we cannot reach outside of a dualistic conceptualization of human bodies simply by seeking to transcend or bypass it. They contend: “The only way to get outside the dualism is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo”. We  do not get past or move beyond the dualism. This is not a successive stage of progression. The dualism is a conceptual event whose historical and contemporary activity gives rise to consequences that cannot be invalidated or ignored, thus, the situation is not such that we put the dualism behind us, move on or forward as if unaffected. The only place to go, to move, if we are to get outside the dualism is between: “one must pass ...through binaries, not in order to reproduce them but to find terms and modes that befuddle their operations, connections that demonstrate the impossibility of their binarization, terms, relations, and practices that link the binarily opposed terms”.

A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari.

Volatile Bodies : Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

 

Studio Works : In art we conceive and combine new forms that enrich our lives.

Outpost 281123

Studio Works.

Human beings are unique in retaining the capacity for play.

In art we conceive and combine new forms that enrich our lives.

To live more intensely than usual, inhabiting the whole of our humanity.

Mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, and as such it (myth) helps us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and perhaps allows a glimpse at the core of reality.

A Short History of Myth.

Karen Armstrong.

The Haptic Sense of Making.

Doing and feeling at the  same time.

The physical/spiritual/corporeal sense of being/becoming.

The Spatial Dimension.

Defining Self/Organizing Experience.

The human body its feelings at the centre of the architectural form.

Making Atmospheres/Environments. 

A Place Set Apart.

Mark Rothko.

WORK, volumes 1-6.

Don't Forget The Lamb.

Lamina.

Brian Clarke.

NOT FOR RESALE.

BOOKS FOR EDUCATIONAL USE ONLY.

Sowing the seeds of knowledge.

Dawson Books.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

In the hands of a brilliant craftsman like Mies van der Rohe, a spatiality of alienation may still provide its rewards through the elegance of material and construction. But the more extreme applications of Cartesian space present an insidious threat to our identity as individuals. The other extreme to alienation of the body is over-manipulation of the body. Our bodies are circuited out of existence as our world is realized in electonically stimulated sensation.

To help people inhabit the world, we feel, the basic act is not organizing but caring; the architect's client is not undifferentiated society but caring individuals. In the rhetoric of the past decades, the difficult act of dwelling , based on the act of caring, is elitist. It requires effort, and that sets some apart from others. 

The architects' proper role, it seems to us, is an accepting and absorbing one, to encourage others to make the effort and to develop the physical surrounds that make dwelling possible and attractive. Curiously, the wholesale inhuman 'social' manipulation of urban form by twentieth-century architectural and planning offices has put a disproportionate emphasis on originality, on the unique.

 

Rather, we believe, the design of the environment is a choreography of the familiar and the surprising, in which the familiar has the central role, and a major function of the surprising is to render the familiar afresh.

Kent C. Bloomer, Charles W. Moore. 1977

Alternative Construction.

Contemporary Natural Building Methods.

Prototyping For Architects.

Sensing Spaces.

Marking The Line.

Ceramics and Architecture.

Interactions of Colour and Bodies : Rothko/Neri/Kundera/Schiele, subjects alone in a moment of utter immobility.

Manuel Neri

Milan Kundera

Josef Albers

Mark Rothko

Egon Schiele

The use of the word 'immobility' recalls an article that Rothko wrote in the 1947

"For me the great achievements of the centuries in which the artist accepted the probable and familiar as his subjects were the pictures of the single human figure - alone in a moment of utter immobility."

p84, Possibilities , 1, New York, 1947

The world is overloaded/the nature of things : Peter Zumthor, Jean Baudrillard

The world is overloaded of signs and information, representative of things that nobody completely understands, because they are in turn nothing but signs representative of other signs.

The real thing remains hidden. Nobody can ever see it.

Peter Zumthor

The nature of things cannot be discovered by analyzing them according to their functions, by labeling or categorizing them but by understanding their relationship to people, their behavior and emotions which caused creation of these objects.

Jean Baudrillard

Atmosphere and Surrounding Objects : Loose Assemblages/Living Emotions/Theoretical Gaze

Paintings being living emotions. Mark Rothko

The atmosphere of a work of art, what surrounds it, that 'place' in which it exists - all this is thought of as a lesser thing, charming but not essential. Professionals insist on essentials ... not understanding that everything we use to make art is precisely what kills it. This is what every painter I know understands. And this is what almost no composer I know understands.

The Music of Morton Feldman, reprinted from his essay  "The anxiety in art"

OUTPOST STUDIO  July 2021

Loose Assemblages : The Movement of Ideas and Feelings

Touch and materials as a normative support/exploration for the theoretical gaze

Bento's Sketchbook : John Berger

Existence appertains to the nature of substance.

A substance cannot be produced from anything else: it will therefore be its own cause, that is its essence necessarily involves existence, or, existence appertains to its nature.

Ethics, Part 1, Proposition VII, Proof

Conscious minds arise from establishing a relationship between organism and an object-to-be-known. Damasio

Architectural Body

Organism-Person-Environment

Drawing is a  form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.

The Human Body through drawing and philosophy

Berger/Spinoza 141

Matters of a discursive consciousness are explicit and explainable, and the line between discursive and practical consciousness is fluctuating and permeable, both drawing on the other in the act of agency/making social.

The defining point of agency is namely its potential to transform the given.

Generative energies, entanglements, sensorial diversions from an open studio window overlooking Anglia Square

Improvisations/choreographed with the music/ambient noise are exploratory encounters  between flesh and sound

A hut of ones own (within and bounded by others), crafted and organized around simple processes and interactions within a fallow site given over to creative ecology of energies and enterprise

Vibrant yet curiously passive form of  urbanism

Affectivity as a mimesis of lively transfers between things, humans and non-humans

Human subjectivity : Mimetic Encounters/Explorations

Art works by gathering up forms and materials for affective experimentations in subjectivity

Corporeal unconscious animated by sensitivities/sympathies, a putative affinity (haptic) between certain things including bodies and organs which makes them liable not only to be similarly affected by the same influence, but more especially to affect or influence one another. 

Intentionality/Sympathy/Sentiment/Difference

Inducing a particular set of ethical/political/social responses in actor/social audience 

Mimesis : Paradox or Encounter. Jane Bennett

Calling a sympathy/subjectivity between coloured cloth/wallpaper/display cabinet and human flesh

Francesca Woodman

Mimesis and suggestion in the social,enacted through layers of mediation surrounding humans, objects and non-humans.

Camouflage. Neil Leach

Mimesis

Sensuous Correspondence

Sympathetic Magic

Mimicry

Becoming 

Sensations in Space and Time (the experience/entanglement of phenomena and idea)

Agency/Foraging/Making/Gathering

Subjectivity is relational (always in process)

A Species of Making Spaces

Tentativeness, attentive to situatedness 

A diffractive methodology enables a critical rethinking of science and the social in their relationality, moving beyond separate entities, separate sets of concern. 

Karen Barad 

Organism 

Person

Environment

Arakawa and Madeline Gins

For Merleau-Ponty, Experience can only be understood between the mind and the body or across them in their lived conjunction.

The mind is always embodied, always based on corporeal and sensory relations.

Elizabeth Grosz.

Richard Serra : Verb List Compilation

Actions to Relate to Oneself, 1967-1967

Drawing in its frameworks and dimensions/presence and absence/its here and elsewhere

Exploring the fragility of a painting in the landscape

Canvas as sheltering construction, Raveningham Sculpture Trail

Diagram-Map-Chart, is a symbolic depiction emphasizing (mapping) relationships

Diagrams For The Imagination : Arakawa

Apokatastasis : Jim Jarmusch, Jozef Van Wissem

Litany Of Echoes : James Blackshaw

New Music, for old instruments : Paul Metzger, Jozef Van Wissem

Brilliant Trees : David Sylvian

Body As Cultural Product

Both psychic and social dimensions must find their place in reconceptualizing the body, not in opposition to each other, but as necessarily interactive.

Volatile Bodies/Chaos-Territory-Art : Elizabeth Grosz

Spatial Asperity/Mesh, Membrane and Gauze, Möbius Strip, Pattening, 

Actuality : Robert Mangold

Paintings around the particles/flows of things/boundaries/intervals of presence and absence

Induction/Capacitance/Encapsulated Layers

Drawing and its attempts to map out/make visible contingent things

Contingency, is what remains, as it comes up against causality/constantly passing through

Objects/Things conceptualized by the exploration of drawing (intervals of blindness)

Linking Surface to the Aesthetic Experience of Space.

Experiences incorporating interests with environmental textures into Art.

Points of Contact/Confluence of Circumstances

Materials bound by contact/canvas

Patina, absences, gesso, textile wrappings, field chalk, exhumed oyster shells, yellow ochre,

A philosophy of Reading/Matter/Rooms, 

The Lake of The Mind

Stochastic Thinking, Steven Holl

Solitude/Libraries : Cell/Court/Domain

Capacitance, relationships between intensities and movements

Clay, Waxed Surface, Liquid Rust, Calico,

Sensate Bandages/Windings/Armatures : Corporeal Landscapes/Assemblages/Things

Flesh, elementary pre-communicative, subject and object develop.

Making as Growth : Tim Ingold

Social Architectures/Anthropologies/Imaginary Projects/Interfaces/Screens

Timothy Morton : Realist Magic

The elasticity of sensation, affective and wonderous

Sally Mann : Matter Lent/Collodion wetplate negatives

Corpus, liquid light, flesh, spirit, trace, outline, human body, performative,

Paintings/Enactments : Canvas as a spatial verb

Espace-Milieu, painting as environment/entanglements and situations

Ceramic/Process and its theoretical objects 

As a series of practices, making reality by bringing things together or separating them into their singularities, or making machines/desiring machines

Desire can be seen as an Actualization

Gathering Notations : Bernard Tuchumi  

Both presence and absence are coupled in this framework

Deleuze/Guattari

Glass/GLAS : Resistivity/Inclusions, A Field in England.

Translucent aesthetics, beyond the opacities of the sensible the rational.

An image that adequately expresses both the efficacy and the temporariness of the phenomena ( joining a diffused/invisible flow of energy, a breadth that wends its way ceaselessly through the world). Animating it as it goes.

Vital Nourishment, Departing from happiness, Francois Jullian.

What is a body capable of -  

Spinoza

Building/Making, into the theoretical performative object (that does theory)

Albers/Clarke : Interactions, Counterpoints, Intervals between colour/forms, 

Membrane, Discursive, Diffractive, Sensory, Layered and Filtered Light,

Body, Movement, Mind, Assemblages, Exploratory, Speculative, Choreographic,

Deleuze/Guattari, understand the body more in terms of what AFFECTS it is capable of, instead of the consequences of having a body.

Peter Zumthor : Thermal Baths

Human Agency/Temporal transitions between matter and movement.

Immaterial/Concrete/Water : Bodies in contact/the corporeal social human body

Manifolds/Theory of Temporality/3 Synthesis of Time

Memory     Past Preserved                    Condition

Present       Habit Instants                     Agent

New           Future, actual/virtual          Creation of The New

 

Multiplicity, purality of contemplating souls.

Asymmetries between particular past and general future.

Temporality involves multiple interacting processes.

 

Architecture becomes Spatial Agency

We all make space : Jeremy Till

Paintings, space, volume, surface, passages, actualizations, claddings/camouflage 

One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences, both phenomenological and filmic, reading a space by its depth of field, its thickness.

Turbulence House, New Mexico, Steven Holl.

Aesthetics/Asperities : Resultants that incorporate the friction (asperity) of their trajectories through a medium. Tilt-up concrete construction, Chapel of St, Ignatius, Seattle. Steven Holl.

Navigations and Vectors/conduits/intervals and traces between discursive practices.

Wrapped Silences : Assembled Sectional Elements/Thresholds

Surfaces on Mourning/Samsara, a beauty fed on emptiness